Letterboxd — Your life in film

"But Reeves has made a bold and fiercely compelling saga of pandemonium and survival. By the time events concluded, I couldn’t help but feel like this story had sprung forth from deep inside the national psyche, forcing the viewer to engage in potentially uncomfortable conversations that could prove to be hauntingly cathartic in the long run.

Not that we should be taking any of this too seriously. At its heart, this is still a digitally shot, handheld found-footage throwback to…

“You can kill us, but we’ll just regroup in hell.”

Avatar: The Way of Water, quite literally, has no beginning and no end.

Takes all of the original’s most awe inspiring iconography and twists it into moments of abject horror, right down to reusing footage in completely opposite contexts. All of this is to subsequently build a new and hopeful free flowing world and form/structure from that destruction.

The film effortlessly weaves through an intense cat and mouse thriller, a visually…

Having honed his style through five years of translating Redditor nightmares into horror shorts, director Kyle Edward Ball’s hypnagogic feature follows a pair of young siblings who awake to find their parents gone and their house a phantasmagoric prison. Narratively, Skinamarink feels akin to a Poltergeist whose influences are the menacing architecture of K.Kurosawa, the analog unease of Kōji Shiraishi, the first-person terror of indie horror games (Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy especially), rather than gothic horror’s hauntings. That is, if Poltergeist…

michael bay's pursuit of an emotional hyperreality finds its footing at last, in a film that's smarter than it has any right to be and deeply reverent of its direct inspirations. was the "alley-oop" scene shot at the same on-ramp as To Live and Die in LA (coming after a chase sequence invoking Terminator 2) or did I imagine that? this is a film enamored with the heist format and mercifully dumb enough to avoid becoming self-conscious about that.

the…

"My brother didn't do anything. He's a good man. But I'm not."

There's a reason Bay jokingly (and in trademark immodest fashion) has a supporting character name-check not just the first, but the first TWO '90s action spectaculars that put him on the map in the initial act of his latest "one for me" blow 'em up extravaganza. It's not just hubris run amok, but a signpost saying "we're going back to the beginning" with AMBULANCE. In essence, this is…

When it comes to filming an action sequence Bay is almost entirely disinterested in spatial coherence and architectural logic. He is very nearly abstract in the way he thinks about action and the continuity editing that follows. Lately, he has placed his camera in close proximity, disallowing wider-angles, and opting for cantered images that flow in and out of one another like a montage of excess, destruction and discomfort. It isn’t easy to settle in to what Michael Bay does…